Word: comfortableness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...strange to realize how many things that are taken for granted as natural and eternal were invented at a specific time and place. Not just objects like electrical appliances but attitudes and perceptions. Like privacy, for example. Or the need for physical comfort. What is comfort, anyway, and where did the idea come from...
...what are now called French windows. The Dutch also believed strongly in schooling and kept their older children at home, whereas French and English children were ordinarily sent out as apprentices at age seven. With more light, more privacy and more children came a stronger sense of family life -- comfort is what we see in the interiors of De Hooch and Vermeer...
...brick row houses with double-hung windows but such Dutch discoveries as Chinese tea and Oriental carpets. In Georgian England of the following century, the practical was combined with the beautiful. Lo, the great furniture makers: Sheraton, Chippendale, Hepplewhite. "Ah! there is nothing like staying at home for real comfort," says a character in Jane Austen's Emma...
...views of how to make houses more pleasant. "Reexamining bourgeois traditions means returning to house layouts that offer more privacy and intimacy than the so-called open plan, in which space is allowed to 'flow' from one room to another," he writes. "A reexamination of the bourgeois tradition of comfort is an implicit criticism of modernity, but it is not a rejection of change...
Only after writing a whole history of the idea of comfort does Rybczynski attempt to define it. The simplest definition would be just "feeling good," but that is too simple. The scientific definition would be a "condition in which discomfort has been avoided," but that is too negative. Since Rybczynski is not a scientist but an architect, and a subtly witty analyst of how people live, he prefers to end with a metaphor, "the Onion Theory of Comfort." In this, the slowly evolving attributes of comfort -- privacy, intimacy, domesticity, pleasure, ease, leisure, efficiency, convenience -- form a series of layers, partly...